If I were buying luggage for the first time in a long time or replacing an old set, I’d choose Quince. You’re getting polished, durable suitcases with reliable features, and without paying a premium for the brand name. At $270 for both an expandable carry-on and a large checked bag, it’s an excellent value.

Away doesn’t offer a comparable bundle, but its Large Flex ($425) and Carry-On Flex ($325) are almost identical to Quince’s Expandable Large Check-In ($220) and Expandable Small Carry-On ($140). All four are polycarbonate hard-shell suitcases with similar exterior and interior dimensions, capacity, and weight, though Quince’s are both slightly lighter. They also have similar features: 360-degree spinner wheels, a Travel Sentry combination lock, a removable laundry bag, and, crucially, a lifetime warranty. After traveling with both, I found them to be equally sturdy. I was also able to pack the exact same clothes in both sets, and the Quince Large Check-In actually gave me more room once expanded.

Even the designs are quite similar. Take away Away’s emblem, and it would be tough to tell these suitcases apart. Quince’s branding is even more minimal; there are no flashy logos, which I aesthetically appreciate, but it does make the bags harder to spot on a baggage carousel. Both brands offer a solid range of colors, so that’s mostly a matter of taste. For me, the more important distinction is the price. Quince gives you essentially the same experience for less money, so why pay double for Away?

To further sweeten the deal, the bundle knocks another $90 off the combined price. And Quince’s value isn’t limited to its advantage over Away. It’s significantly less expensive than comparable luggage from popular brands like July, Monos, Travelpro, and Briggs & Riley. Quince also gives customers 365 days to return unused products, which is a much more generous window than competitors.

I’m sold on Quince’s luggage, and I’m already eyeing its Eco Compression Packing Cubes ($46) and Italian Leather Pouch Travel Set ($72) for my next trip. At this point, Quince has earned a suspicious amount of my trust.

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None of this weekend’s picks had a massive marketing push, or watched by many in theaters and that’s exactly what’s make them so underrated. One turns a two-minute glitch on a cafe TV into a tiny sci-fi marvel, another follows a drifter who’s hilariously bad at vengeance, and the third gave Brie Larson her best role long before anyone knew her name. All three movies are streaming on Prime Video right now.

We also have guides to the best new movies to stream, the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best free movies, and the best movies on Amazon Prime Video.

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2020)

Genre: Comedy, Sci-Fi
IMDb rating: 7.2/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 99%

A cafe owner named Kato discovers that the television in his cafe can show him exactly two minutes into the future. Once his employees and neighbors catch wind of it, the fun experiment becomes complicated after they start using it to make money and end up drawing the attention of dangerous people.

What makes the movie so much fun is how far it takes a simple idea. I really like how the characters constantly test the limits of the two-minute window and come up with ideas to create a chaotic infinite loop. Another impressive aspect of this Japanese indie movie is that it was shot to look like one continuous take, with clever, seamless hidden cuts to maintain the illusion of uninterrupted action.

You can watch Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes on Prime Video.

Blue Ruin (2014)

Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller
IMDb rating: 7.1/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 96%

Dwight, a quiet drifter living out of his car, learns that the man who killed his parents is being released from prison. He decides to kill the murderer. The problem is Dwight has no idea what he’s doing, and his amateurish attempt at revenge drags his estranged sister and her family into a spiraling blood feud with the killer’s own relatives. It’s a revenge thriller about what happens when an ordinary man tries to play executioner.

Macon Blair’s lead performance is the whole engine here – awkward, terrified, and utterly convincing as a man completely unequipped for the violence he’s chosen to unleash. Director Jeremy Saulnier skips the slick choreography entirely in this movie, leaving violence that is tense, ugly, and far more honest about what vengeance actually costs.

You can watch Blue Ruin on Prime Video.

Short Term 12 (2013)

Genre: Drama
IMDb rating: 7.9/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 98%

Grace Howard (Brie Larson) supervises a foster care facility for at-risk teens. She’s funny, patient, and able to reach kids most adults have written off, like Marcus (LaKeith Stanfield), who’s about to age out of the system. When a new resident, Jayden (Kaitlyn Dever), arrives with a story that cuts uncomfortably close to Grace’s own unspoken past, she’s forced to finally confront the trauma she’s spent years outrunning.

Long before Captain Marvel, Brie Larson delivered what I still consider her finest performance right here. She makes Grace warm and tough without ever tipping into sainthood. The film treats these kids with respect without turning their pain into cheap melodrama. It reminded me that the people holding everyone else together are often the ones who need help most.

You can watch Short Term 12 on Prime Video.

The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around power, prediction, geopolitics, accountability and the future of digital life.

The series will be published in two parts each week over five weeks, with each installment building on the one before it. At the end of the series, the complete essay will be brought together in a single PDF edition, providing the full argument in one place.

Part II — When They Still Understood Us

Part I looked at the slow transformation taking place beneath the daily controversies surrounding Big Tech. This second part goes back to the beginning, asking what these companies originally understood about people and how the metrics that once measured their success gradually became the definition of it.

It has become fashionable to tell the story of Big Tech as though it were always destined to end here. In retrospect, it is easy to portray the rise of the major platforms as the inescapable march of surveillance capitalism, monopolistic ambition, and unchecked technological power. That narrative is emotionally satisfying because it offers clear villains and a comforting sense of inevitability. It also happens to be incomplete.

Cory Doctorow has given this deterioration a memorable name: “enshittification.” His argument is that platforms initially serve users well, then, once users and business customers are locked in, progressively shift value away from both toward shareholders, degrading the service in the process. It is a powerful account of how platforms become extractive. But it is not quite the argument here. The deeper problem is not simply that Big Tech has learned to extract more from us but that it has become increasingly convinced that because it can measure and predict our behavior, it understands us and, by extension, the societies it has come to mediate. The failure is therefore not only economic; it is also epistemic. The metric has become a substitute for the mission.

One cannot understand why these companies now appear increasingly disconnected from the societies they helped shape without first acknowledging that, for a remarkably long time, they understood those societies exceptionally well.

Technology succeeds when it solves technical problems. It changes the world when it solves human ones.

That was the genius of the first generation of internet platforms. Their founders did not invent friendship, curiosity, creativity or community. They simply recognized that the internet had reached a stage where these deeply human instincts required new forms of expression. The web of the late 1990s was exhilarating, but it was also fragmented, uneven and, for many people, intimidating. Finding information often required patience. Discovering interesting websites depended on chance as much as design. Publishing demanded a degree of technical literacy that excluded far more people than it empowered. The internet was open, but openness alone does not necessarily produce accessibility.

The great platforms emerged not because they sought to replace the internet but because they made it intelligible. Google transformed an expanding wilderness of information into something navigable. Wikipedia demonstrated that knowledge could be organized through collaboration rather than hierarchy. YouTube lowered the barriers to publishing so dramatically that expertise escaped universities, broadcasters and production studios. Facebook addressed an even more fundamental challenge. It recognized that the internet was no longer simply about information; it had become about people. Until then, maintaining relationships online had been surprisingly cumbersome. Email was too formal, instant messaging too ephemeral, personal websites too static. Facebook reduced social interaction to something almost frictionless. Its success lay not in technological sophistication but in psychological intuition.

This is easy to forget because the platforms that dominate our lives today bear only a partial resemblance to the ones that first captured our imagination. Facebook did not begin as an endless stream of algorithmically selected content. It was, in essence, a digital address book enriched by photographs, conversations, and the ordinary rituals of everyday life. It became valuable because it mirrored existing relationships rather than attempting to manufacture new ones. There was comfort in discovering former classmates, following the lives of distant relatives, or organizing gatherings that would otherwise have required dozens of emails and phone calls. The platform expanded social life without yet attempting to redefine it.

YouTube offered a similarly modest promise. It was not originally designed to maximize engagement or optimize watch time. It functioned more like an immense public archive whose value derived from its unpredictability. One could arrive searching for a lecture on astronomy and leave having discovered a forgotten jazz performance, a documentary on Greek history, or a repair manual for a washing machine. Recommendation existed, but it remained subordinate to curiosity. Users still felt as though they were exploring rather than being guided.

Even Twitter (now X), before it became a battleground for politics, culture wars, and performative outrage, captured something important about the changing nature of public conversation. It collapsed distance between journalists, academics, politicians, and ordinary citizens in ways that would have seemed extraordinary only a few years earlier. For all its imperfections, it suggested that expertise and authority might become more accessible rather than less.

Looking back, what united these companies was not simply technological innovation but a particular philosophy of the internet. They assumed that openness generated value. The more people connected, the richer the network became. Every new participant increased the possibilities for everyone else. Economists describe this as a network effect, but the phrase barely captures its cultural significance. Participation itself became the source of optimism. The internet appeared to be validating one of the oldest liberal ideas: that societies flourish when individuals are free to exchange ideas, collaborate voluntarily, and build institutions from the bottom up.

It is difficult to overstate how persuasive this vision became. Most governments celebrated the digital economy as an engine of innovation. Investors poured unprecedented sums into technology because the opportunities seemed limitless. Civil society organizations embraced online platforms as tools for democratic participation and global advocacy. Even critics of globalization often regarded the internet as an exception, a domain where openness appeared to distribute power rather than concentrate it.

For a brief historical moment, these interests aligned. What was good for technology companies often appeared to be good for users, for markets, and, in many respects, for the internet itself. The incentives reinforced one another. Companies grew by making the network more useful. Users benefited from larger communities. Developers built new services on open standards. The web expanded because success depended on drawing people further into its richness rather than confining them within a single destination.

History, however, has an inconvenient habit of changing the problems that institutions are asked to solve. The sociologist Robert K. Merton once observed that organizations often become prisoners of their own success. Practices that were rational under one set of conditions gradually harden into routines, and routines into orthodoxies. Institutions continue refining the solutions that once made them indispensable even as the environment around them evolves. Success breeds confidence; confidence breeds certainty; certainty eventually makes adaptation more difficult than persistence.

There is no reason to believe technology companies are exempt from this pattern. If anything, their extraordinary success may have accelerated it.

The platforms that once competed to help users navigate an open internet eventually found themselves managing ecosystems of unprecedented scale. Their priorities changed almost imperceptibly. The models they developed during the internet’s age of expansion proved astonishingly effective at connecting people, organizing information, and lowering the costs of participation. The metrics through which they evaluated success, such as growth, engagement, scale, and network effects, were not arbitrary inventions of venture capital. They reflected a period during which connecting more people genuinely created more value for everyone involved. The problem is that the world changed while the metrics remained stable. A measure that once indicated success gradually became the definition of success itself.

There is an obvious parallel here with Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The principle, first articulated by economist Charles Goodhart in the context of monetary policy, describes what happens when an indicator that works as a proxy for an underlying objective is turned into the objective itself. But the problem here is slightly different. The issue is not simply that platforms began gaming their metrics, or that users learned to optimize for them. It is that the metrics gradually became so deeply embedded in the companies’ understanding of success that the distinction between the measure and the mission was lost. The metric did not merely distort the objective; it quietly became the objective.

None of this happened because a group of executives gathered in a boardroom and decided to undermine the open internet. Institutional change is rarely so theatrical. More often, it emerges from countless rational decisions made in pursuit of perfectly reasonable objectives: improve the user experience, reduce friction, personalize recommendations, increase safety, remove inconvenience. Each adjustment appears modest in isolation but collectively they alter the character of the system itself.

This is where history becomes quietly ironic. The companies that had once understood the internet better than anyone else slowly began to forget what had made the internet exceptional in the first place. They continued to believe they were connecting the world, even as they increasingly replaced the world with carefully curated representations of it. They accumulated unprecedented quantities of information about human behavior while becoming progressively less attentive to the human condition.

The distinction is subtle, but it may prove to be the defining story of this technological era. To observe behavior is not the same as understanding experience. A platform can know how long we hesitate before clicking a link, which videos hold our attention for an extra seven seconds, or what sequence of images is most likely to keep us scrolling late into the night. It can infer preferences with astonishing accuracy. It can predict patterns that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. Yet prediction, however sophisticated, remains an impoverished form of understanding. It reveals what people do. It says far less about why they do it, what they fear, what they hope for, or what kind of society they are trying to build together.

That difference, almost invisible at first, is where the story begins to change.

Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD, is a veteran of developing and analysing Internet policy to ensure an open and global Internet.

Filed Under: big tech, enshittification, goodhart’s law, history, metric not mission, open internet

Anthropic now allows you to run Claude Code via cloud sessions without signing up for the research preview, and it’s offering up to $250 in free promotional credits.

Cloud sessions run Claude Code on Anthropic’s infrastructure instead of your own computer, so you can start a task, leave it running remotely, and return later to review the work.

“Cloud sessions run on Anthropic-hosted infrastructure, so the work keeps going even without your computer running,” Anthropic explained.

In our tests, we observed that you can start a cloud session from claude.ai/code, the Code section of the Claude mobile app, the desktop app, or the CLI using claude --cloud.

Claude Code’s cloud sessions have been available to some users via research preview, but now they’re officially available to eligible subscribers, and Anthropic is offering free usage credits to encourage existing subscribers to try them.

Anthropic explains how you can claim free credits

Anthropic is giving eligible Pro users $100 in promotional cloud-session credits, while Max subscribers get $250.

However, it is worth noting that the credits are separate from normal Claude usage limits and are applied automatically when you start a cloud session.

“If you hit a limit locally, keep going in the cloud until your credit runs out,” Anthropic said.

If you like the idea of Claude Code’s cloud sessions, you can claim the offer from Claude’s website by October 7, and any remaining balance expires on November 4.

Once the promotional balance is exhausted, cloud sessions go back to counting against your normal plan limits. There’s no separate charge for the cloud container itself.

The offer is limited to individual Pro and Max subscribers who had an active subscription when the promotion began on September 23.

Join Mikko Hyppönen and security leaders from the NFL, CHANEL, and Atlassian for a two-hour digital summit on what AI-speed attacks change, what defenders should stop doing, and how to validate, decide, fix, and re-validate at machine speed.

Save your seat

• Hacktron chained a libheif heap overflow, reached through ImageMagick on OpenAI’s Discourse forum, leveraging an OpenAI SSO flaw to briefly take over employee ChatGPT and Codex accounts
• The researchers themselves invoked XKCD #2347, whose 2020 alt text happens to name ImageMagick as the dependency that will one day break
• ImageMagick served as only the pathway to the actual vulnerable component, libheif, an obscure decoder pulled in indirectly across Slack, Meta, and GitHub Enterprise amongst other mediums

When Hacktron AI recently disclosed its months-long libheif research, the researchers reached for a familiar picture that also, to some degree, hints at what let them break into OpenAI in the first place.

They pointed readers to xkcd #2347, Randall Munroe’s 2020 iconic web cartoon of all modern digital infrastructure balanced on a single load-bearing block that some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining.

The Cricut StickerPix Print and Print + Cut could birth a generation of sticker moguls. 

Rolling down a hallway with a shirt slung over its neck, Goose looks less like a factory demo and more like a small appliance that decided to grow a personality. Prototype 1 from San Francisco’s The Robot Works is a white, low, rounded base with a long articulated neck, camera eyes set in a bonnet so you can see where it is looking, and a bright orange beak that doubles as a gripper. A blue polka-dot wrap gives the machine a costume instead of a chassis. Founders posted the first public clip this week with a simple brief: tidy, play, live.

Richard Wei has spent months sitting down with families to discuss what they really need from a robot in their house, and the team has used that information to create something they would like to have themselves. Humphrey Hu, who formerly worked with Anki on making highly expressive robot faces, will join him on this project. After considering all of the jobs that tend to build up around the house, as well as how a machine might interact with children and grandparents, they decided against a human-shaped body. Instead, the design features a wide stance close to the floor to keep the creature low to the ground, as well as a long neck that allows it to reach for items such as a sock, a wall outlet, a door handle, or a pile of laundry without having to stand on two legs and tower over the space.

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They also kept the hardware minimal on purpose, resulting in a robot that rolls, looks around, and then moves on to complete its job. It analyzes its blind spots before moving, and the motors are meant to give way if something like a foot, a chair, or a child gets in the way, and the ability to halt and send it somewhere else was purposefully built in, so it wasn’t an afterthought. A video released shows the robot performing things like placing a man’s foot onto an ottoman, gathering clothes off the hardwood floor, reaching up to a kitchen counter, inserting a plug into a wall outlet, and even pulling open a door when some relatives arrive with children.

Some early write-ups also highlighted some low-key jobs for older individuals who may be less mobile, such as fetching something you’ve tagged, bringing a walker over to the bedside when it’s time for bed, lighting the route to the toilet, keeping an eye out for falls, and sending a ping to family members. Some early elevator and door operations still need a human on the other end of the line, but on the positive side, autonomy is real in some areas and borrowed in others. Which is reasonable for the first version of the product.

The concept is for the robot’s capabilities to evolve as a library rather than coming with a predefined set of talents when you buy it, and they intend to vet each new software before it is released, allowing you to choose what it can see and do. The company is now selling services such as a full-room tidy, checking in on Grandpa, being a companion during story time, taking a look around the house while you’re away, checking the stove, and bringing a parcel inside. The pitch is that life evolves, thus the machine should be able to continually adding new jobs to its repertoire rather of becoming locked in one specific role. That’s the whole point of “built to grow.” They also claim that any household data will remain under your control, rather than being a default action that occurs automatically when the robot arrives.

Unfortunately, orders are currently closed because the initial prototype is still pre-production, with no price or commercial warranty available. Wei says the company is looking for “foster families” that will let Goose learn on real floors, real clutter, and real schedules. You can contact them at therobotworks.ai, while more information will be provided as the device gets closer to launch.

Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Washington this week for talks with President Donald Trump in the same custom state limousine that has followed him on foreign trips since 2022. Hongqi N701 is an internal project code more than a dealer name, and FAW Group’s Hongqi division built it for China’s top leadership rather than any public buyer. Hongqi means red flag, a name the brand has carried since 1958, when First Automobile Works first assembled luxury cars for senior officials.

Public sightings of the mysterious sedan began in July 2022, when Xi visited Hong Kong for the 25th handover anniversary. Since then, the long sedan has appeared in Russia, Egypt, and San Francisco last year, New Delhi for the BRICS summit a few weeks ago, and most recently in Washington. These trucks, you know, the ones who drive the leader about, frequently arrive ahead of the big cheese, often with black covers draped around a flatbed so all you see is fabric instead of the spaces between the panels. Surprisingly, manufacturing is carefully controlled; they reportedly only make approximately 50 of them per decade, or five per year, on a budget of around 572 million yuan ($85.2 million).

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It’s 5.5 meters long, or around 18 feet, and has a large towering vertical chrome grille that reminds me of the Hongqi H9 sedan. There is also a red flag insignia slapped on the hood. Smaller flag poles sit on the front tire arches, and the side windows extend far back from the B-pillars, giving the second row passengers more freedom to move around, making it feel more like a genuine cabin back there. The back appearance is rather basic, with only some rectangular lights, some chrome on the tailgate, and two large exhaust pipes. Unfortunately, the actual weight, engine, and any armor plating specifications remain top secret. According to insider reports, it weighs more than 3 tons and features a large V8 or 6.0-liter V12 engine with 400 horsepower, as well as 21-inch run-flat wheels and some rather strong bullet-proof glass. It also appears to feature a separate air filtration system and a sealed cabin, as well as an encrypted link back to Beijing, but none of this has been confirmed by FAW.

Joe Biden caught a glimpse of it three years ago in San Francisco. He described it as a real beauty, and Xi was quick to point out that it was manufactured in China, before opening the rear door to allow Biden to look inside. Biden compared it to the American Cadillac, and now Washington can see the similarity up close. The Cadillac One, or the Beast, is built on a heavy truck chassis and is expected to weigh between 7 and 9 tons. The Hongqi N701 has the proportions of a long luxury sedan, but both automobiles are meant to protect a head of state from small arms fire, bomb fragments, and chemical threats while also serving as a mobile office.

Mao Zedong began hammering on about a Chinese state car in the 1950s. The early CA72 and CA770 Hongqis made the rounds of parades and whatnot, but were later supplanted by imported limousines. However, Xi had different plans when he began flying Hongqi L5s to New Zealand in 2014, later upgrading to the N501 and now the N701. Each time one of these sedans travels abroad, it gets to see the open road, but the whole specification sheet remains locked away with the individuals who created it.

If there was one thing that was obvious this from Meta Connect this year, it’s that the social media giant is all-in on its burgeoning line of smart glasses.

Indeed, the glasses were pretty much everywhere at the annual event, where Meta shows off its newest hardware and AI products. Both Meta staff and the flocks of influencers who frequent the event seemed to arrive with the glasses glued to their faces. Most of the demos the company offered this week also involved the glasses.

I swiftly joined the bespectacled masses and found myself trying on pair after pair of Meta’s high-tech specs.

One of the more notable products I had an opportunity to demo were Meta’s new, still-unreleased, audio-only smart glasses. News of these glasses emerged not long after the company weathered accusations that it was selling “pervert glasses,” with critics alleging that its camera-equipped specs could be used for nefarious surveillance purposes.

The new glasses come equipped with six microphones, but no camera, and they have no native way to record your surroundings, which should go a long way toward easing privacy concerns. They are significantly lighter than any of the other smart glasses I’ve worn, and they were quite comfortable.

The Meta staffer I talked to emphasized the glasses’ entertainment and communication options: you can listen to music easily (they’re more comfortable than earbuds) and take phone calls without reaching for your phone.

The glasses will also integrate with Muse, Meta’s personal agentic system, which can carry out tasks on the user’s behalf. The new integration, which isn’t yet available to the public, lets wearers speak to Muse and give it commands verbally. Meta also plans to personalize the agent, letting users pick from an assortment of cute digital avatars that can represent the agent when it communicates with them.

I was given an opportunity to try this out, which was fun but also somewhat comical. You have to be very direct with the agent, and you can’t talk to anyone else at the same time or it will get confused. Problematically, I kept chatting intermittently with the Meta staffer who’d given me the glasses, and the agent kept thinking I was speaking to it, so it would talk over her.

Still, in the right context, it’s easy to see how this new integration could be incredibly useful. If you don’t mind being seen in public talking to your own sunglasses, you’ll be able to ask Muse to take care of various digital tasks for you, like sending emails or reciting to-do lists, and it will handle them while you’re out grocery shopping or having a beer. You can also ask the glasses anything, and like a mobile version of ChatGPT, they’ll spit out an answer. (I asked the glasses a question about World War II, and they gave me a succinct and historically accurate response.)

Finally, I also got to test-drive a second audio-only pair: Meta’s new glasses for the hearing impaired. Given that hearing loss affects many families (some 50 million Americans are said to have some level of hearing loss), this device, unlike a lot of other modern tech gadgets, serves a clear and practical purpose.

I spoke briefly with a member of Meta’s research team who said the glasses had been in development for some five years, and he pointed out a price difference that could make them appealing: whereas a lot of hearing aids can run as high as $1,600, the glasses will sell for $150.

The experience of wearing these glasses was interesting. Meta had me put earplugs in before trying them on to simulate the hearing loss that the glasses are meant to help users overcome. Once the glasses were on, they seemed to amplify the voice of the person I was talking to. Users can switch the amplification from focused, which zeroes in on the person in front of them, to omnidirectional, which picks up sound from all around them, depending on how they want to experience their surroundings.

Mark Zuckerberg has made it clear that he believes smart glasses are the future, and it’s evident that his company is doing its best to fulfill that mandate. But smart glasses remain a niche that has yet to truly find its footing. What was most obvious at Connect is that Meta has — in an attempt to succeed where others have failed — cast a very wide net, trying to make its glasses stylish, functional, and, most of all, useful.

Is this the future? Unsurprisingly, everyone at Connect seemed to think so. I suppose we’ll have to see if the rest of the world follows suit.